Avoiding Evil Empiredom

[Arbitrary Aardvark]

In my current (devnul mod) game, I've managed to become the evil empire. I think I primarily became one through overly aggressive colonizing.
I'm really in a weak position, since I'm short on
resources and most colonies are under-developed and located in systems with my new enemies. If I
lose enough colonies, will I stop being the evil
enemy?

[Atrocities]

Dude, *shakes head* To put it simply, no.

[Gozra]

Originally posted by Atrocities:
Dude, *shakes head* To put it simply, no.

Wrong answer. In a recent 1.49 game at PBW I turned into the evil empire at the same time the computer did a turn for us. My Empire lost all the trade money. I had outlying colonies attacked and destroyed. the Empire wide depression that followed caused me to lose ships. After several turns I made peace with The AI's and Humans after losing Evil Empire Status Due to the reduction of My empire.

[Baron Munchausen]

Yep, Mega-Evil can change. It's especially interesting in single player when an AI gets there first because you can ally with the other AIs and gang up on it, but your superior planning and organization skills will lead you to replace it and they will eventually all turn on you.

Also, by changing the Mega-Evil reaction in the AI_Politics files you can reduce the 'instant enemy' effect and make a much more realistic shift of attitude that takes several turns.

[Nodachi]

Since MEE is score-based just losing ships and planets shouldn't change that status. Unless your score can go down, which is something I hadn't noticed. Anyone know for sure?

Edit OK, I just checked. Your score does go down as you lose things. So, my original answer is wrong, if you are MEE and your opponents do enough damage your status should change.

Nodachi

[ June 12, 2002, 18:35: Message edited by: Nodachi ]

[RiTz21]

Woah !!

Hold a sec. What do you guys mean by this "evil Empire" ? Could someone clarify please?

thanks !
RiTz21

[Will]

It's when an empire reaches a certain score (something like 500k points and 70% above second place empire). There's a flag in the AI's happiness that causes them to become extremely pissed off if you get this big, and thus gang up on you.

This prevents super-big empires from quickly gobbling up all the AIs, since you have to fight all at once.

[capnq]

The trigger conditions for Mega-Evil Empire can be modded or turned off entirely in Settings.txt .

The unmodded threshholds are a score of 500 thousand, and 170% of second place for a human player, or 250% of second for an AI.

[raynor]

Your score is calculated based on a number of factors but the tonnage of your ships is weighted more than all of the others. In particular, the game uses your ships that are active. So, if you wanted to, you could either scrap or *mothball* half your fleet, and your score would go down considerably.

Similarly, I would guess that you could use mothballing to keep your empire from ever becoming Evil Empire.

This is an old, old issue. But the score is sorta unrealistic because folks discovered they could build tons and tons of empty bases to over-inflate their score. Since a comparison of your score to that of the AI's plays a big part in surrender...

Recall the tournament to see who could get the highest score in 150 turns. They figured out that you could get all the AI opponents on the map to surrender to you in about 20 turns using the cascade surrender. It was a combination of building empty bases to inflate the score while simultaneously blockading the AI planets.

Another interesting point is that the game doesn't seem to figure units into the score calculation. But they can be just as effective at defending your empire as ships as well as almost effective offensively. By focusing more on units, you can avoid MEE altogether until you are so powerful that it doesn't matter if they all band against you.